[7335] in Athena Bugs
Stripping off of contents enumerations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Mar 18 21:57:23 1991
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1991 17:29:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: belville@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, kcunning@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, info-andrew-bugs+@andrew.cmu.edu
I am writing this in response to the following bug report:
"If I use the "Enumerate" option from inside a table of contents to put
numbers on my section headers, chapter headers, etc, these numbers all
dissappear after I print."
After a long time of pondering, I have finally duplicated this behavior.
The reason why this is happening is that there is a preference set:
*.AutoEnumerate: yes
The implementation of this preference turns out to be not exactly what
we expect:
Inside the txttroff module, printing is done like this:
if (enumerate) {
content_Enumerate
content_UpdateSource
}
Print the document
if (enumerate) {
content_Denumerate
content_UpdateSource
}
This has the effect of blindly denumerating the titles that were already
enumerated before printing.
Kevin, Sharon: You have a choice:
1. Get rid of the preference AutoEnumerate and explicitly set the
enumerations in the document and allow the system to print them if they
are there, or to NOT print them if they are not there.
2. Understand that AutoEnumerate was originally intended as a way to
get section numbers for documents which are expected NOT to have any.
Kevin: please notify the documentation staff of this clarification.
Jik: I am copying this to you so you can mark this bug report as having
a temporary resolution: the documentation doesn't make clear that
existing enumerations will go away.
Susan, Tom, et al: I am copying this to you so you can decide:
1. Change the documentation of the AutoEnumerate preference to say that
existing enumeration will get blown away.
2. (preferred) Change txttroff so that existing enumeration will not
get blown away. The problem with this is that it's not a simple matter
for the computer to decide that the table of contents is enumerated. No
flag is set, and the numbers are just inserted into the text. What
would happen if a user had, by hand, put a number at the beginning of
the first heading? Perhaps there is some clean way to save a flag in
the text document saying that the contents ARE enumerated, and that they
should be kept up to date if AutoEnumerate is set, rather than being set
and cleared.
-Bill Cattey
